Black women at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 neatly divided
themselves into two categories--marginalized insiders standing within the
Fairgrounds and clear-cut outsiders. Inside, speaking in the building that housed
the Haitian exhibition, was a small group of women, including the Washington,
D.C., teacher and writer, Anna Julia Cooper. Hers was a quick five-minute
delivery, calling on women to "take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the
oneness of life." Standing outside the gate, distributing pamphlets about women's
marginalization at the Fair, stood the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. Wells
delivered a protest much more direct than Cooper's. She called her pamphlet "a
clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored
people in this land of the free and home of the brave."1 Her fiery work began
with a history of slavery and included graphic descriptions of lynching in the United States. Common sense might suggest that Wells and those standing with
her outside the Fair's walls were the radicals, those fighting for the most dramatic
changes for women.

Likewise, the scholars who have recovered Cooper's work from obscurity
often group her in the camp demanding less radical change. Hazel V. Carby and Mary Helen Washington help us understand Cooper's analysis of "patriarchy"
and "imperialism" in her 1892 book of essays A Voice From the South.2 But Washington finds Cooper too much the insider. "I must confess to a certain
uneasiness about Cooper's tone in these essays, a feeling that while she speaks
for ordinary black women, she rarely, if ever, speaks to them," says Washington.3 Cooper adopts a high tone and instead of addressing black women's hand-to-
mouth existence, she writes about education and Women's Clubs. Washington
adds: "Her voice is not radical."4

Surely, bread and butter issues seized the minds of black women then. But
asking whether Cooper speaks to or for black women, or speaks from inside or outside, doesn't lead us to Cooper's most important contribution. By design, Cooper did not unleash a fusillade of facts as Wells did, for she believed the
facts would fall on deaf ears. Instead, Cooper worked on a different level. She
rooted out beliefs that moved people to treat black women as chattel--beliefs
that guided racist and sexist thinking about black women--and she recast them. Cooper stepped inside the minds of her audience and quietly laid a foundation
to change their convictions. Readers walked away with new radical definitions
of African Americans' and women's places in America that at first might not
have been apparent to them. Only if readers stopped to piece together what they

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